The Night Angel

by T. Davis Bunn

  He realized with a start that the woman did not like him. Or perhaps merely distrusted him. Whatever the cause, the tension radiated off her in waves. “There is little more I can tell you, ma’am. It is all so new and unshaped in my head, I can scarcely find the proper words.”

  “Do the best you can,” she replied tersely. “It is the most we can ask of any man.”

  So he repeated all he had said the previous day. Of his sense of being called to free the same number of slaves as he had transported into captivity. Of the gold mine. Of his plans for the money.

  She stared over the graves as he spoke. Her expression was taut. Falconer had no idea of her age, but he guessed it as somewhere around his own thirty years. When he finished talking, he continued to watch her. He sensed something deeper beneath the surface. A dark stain, a sorrow perhaps. Or an illness. Something that she most likely thought was hidden from the world.

  When she finally spoke, it was to the rising day and not to Falconer directly. “You did not mention having acquired the plantation.”

  “Did I not?” Falconer tried to recall. “It was an omission due to weariness, Mrs. Hart. I do not seek to hide anything from you.”

  For some reason the words only pinched her face up tighter still. “What do you seek to do with the farm, John Falconer?”

  “To be honest, ma’am, it was arranged on an impulse.” He felt foolish even speaking of it. More than that. Her rigid inspection of the horizon left him feeling that he had done something wrong. “I have no use for land, Mrs. Hart. I just thought . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought if I had all these freedmen passing through, it might be good to have a place to let them rest up. Maybe find a more regular channel from there to safety.” He hesitated, then asked, “Have I done something ill-advised?”

  She started to respond, then clamped down hard on her words. “I ask that you attend the morning church with us, John Falconer. There are several matters which must be addressed.”

  He took that as a dismissal and rose to his feet. “I have no money, Mrs. Hart. But I will repay what I will owe you.”

  She waved that aside, as though of no consequence. “Go and speak with Joseph, sir. Breakfast will be on the table when you are done. Church begins at nine sharp. You will be called by the ringing of the bell.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” He could use the second set of clothes he carried in his satchel. He crossed the rear yard and started around the tavern, wishing he knew what he’d done to upset the good woman so.

  Joseph was seated by the tavern’s front door. He gazed out to the north, his face so intent it seemed to Falconer that every furrow was realigned so as to magnify the aim. Falconer came over and seated himself on the bench. The more he came to know this man, the more he respected him. “You wanted to see me?”

  Joseph shook his head at the rising sun. “Never thought I’d hear a white man talk to me like that.”

  Falconer eased himself back to rest against the tavern wall. “Like what?”

  Joseph turned then, drawing the furrowed intensity around to where it aimed straight at Falconer. “Like I was his equal.”

  “God says all men are brethren.”

  “There you go again, sayin’ them words. Like you was taught a different language. One that sounds the same but ain’t.”

  Falconer felt the testing behind the speech and the look both. As with the woman he had just left, he sensed an undercurrent he could not identify. “Perhaps you have to sink as low as I have fallen. Descend into the depths where the gates of hell are a mouth waiting to swallow men whole. Only then can you truly recognize how little difference there is between one man and another. How the color of skin does not distinguish the soul. How we have all fallen short and can claim salvation only through God’s eternal grace.”

  “Them words you say, they might as well be comin’ from a dream.” Joseph shook his head very slowly. Back and forth. But the dark and flint-hard gaze did not stray. “Geraldine and I talked away the night. I still wasn’t sure what to do when I got up this morning. Now I know.”

  “Joseph, you are not beholden to me.”

  “Now I know,” Joseph repeated. “If you’re called to the road, then so am I.”

  “We covered this ground yesterday. Ada Hart will—”

  “I told you the first day we was together. You don’t know nothing. You need a strong arm and a steady eye and somebody who’ll talk to folks who’d run at the sight of you.”

  “What about your family?”

  He turned his attention back to the northern horizon. “West of the road we come in on is another village. They call it Bethabara. My Geraldine, she calls it heaven on earth. They’s more of us there.”

  “Freed slaves?”

  “Some of ’em. Others born free. We’s all welcome there. They don’t hold to slaves in this place. Mostly they send folks north and west, along the Underground Railroad. You heard of that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Them folks, they’s already heard ’bout what you’re doing. They told me my family’ll be taken in and cared for so’s I can go off to watch your back.”

  Falconer mulled that over. “So people know about me.”

  “Don’t you worry none. These folks, they know how to guard a word.” Joseph rose to his feet. “When do we leave?”

  “Tomorrow or the next day.”

  “I’ll be ready.” Joseph started away, then turned back to add, “The others we come with, they’s callin’ you their Night Angel. Reckon it’s their way of saying thanks.”

  Ada Hart sat and stared at the gravesites. Her son passed by, tilted sideways by the weight of the full pail. He spoke to her. But Ada Hart could not make sense of the words. Matt followed the direction of her focus. Matt was an intelligent and sensitive lad. He had seen her seated in this place often enough before, lost to the earthly realm. Matt’s face creased in a sadness far too old for his years.

  When she spoke, it was to say, “I do not want you growing over close to this stranger, my son.”

  “All the folk say he is doing God’s work, Mama.”

  She started to disagree but could not. For she knew the truth of this as well. “The stranger will be leaving us soon.”

  “I do like him, Mama.”

  “Do as I say.” She watched him take a two-fisted grip on the pail and stagger toward the inn. Ada wished she had found better words to explain. In truth, though, she was in such tumult she had no idea what to say, even to herself.

  The grave closest to the bench was more than three years old. Rain was just beginning to darken its façade with the paint of time. Moravians believed all were equal in both life and death, so the tombstones were all the same, rounded headstones with the names and dates and nothing more. But Ada had sat on this bench and written reams of words. About how no lad should lose his father or a young wife lose her man.

  Ada Hart had any number of possible suitors. For she was not only beautiful, she was wealthy by Moravian standards. She had a share in her family’s farm, in the manner of fields she leased back to her brothers. Her husband had been an only child, a rarity in Moravian culture. His own parents were gone. The Strangers’ Inn was hers now. In the dangerous world of the Carolina Piedmont, many travelers sought safety within the Moravian enclave. They paid well for Ada’s comfort and hearty fare. She could have her pick of any man in the five villages.

  The problem was, she cared for none of them.

  Her husband had been a genuine individual in a society that rewarded sameness. A firm believer, yet a rebel in his own gentle way. A man who loved joy and singing and wind and adventure. He had spent hours seated at the inn’s tables, listening with glistening eyes as strangers described the world beyond the Wachau borders, the Moravian name for their settlement. It also was the name of the Austrian estate of their German patron, Count Zinzendorf. Salem was the largest of the five Wachau villages. The Strangers’ Inn anchored the village to the road and the world bey
ond.

  Ada felt the sun on her face and knew she should be inside, calling the stragglers downstairs for breakfast and preparing herself and Matt for church. But she remained where she was, trapped by all she had lost when they had laid her husband in the ground.

  Three years of solitude was a very long time. It was especially long for a young woman who still felt the fire of life singing in her veins.

  Ada Hart sighed and plucked at her dress. The gray weave was, she feared, the color of her future. She would wed soon enough. The community had been patient, but she knew people had begun talking. A young woman with a young son needed a husband. They would bring her before the elders, and they would select a man if she did not choose one for herself. She had seen it done twice in the years since her husband’s accident. She dreaded the day and hated the helplessness with which she saw it approach.

  Her mother had been against the man Ada had chosen. Both Ada’s parents came from farming families, wedded to the land for seven generations. Ada’s mother had not cared about how this innkeeper had ignited the flame in Ada’s heart. Her mother had spoken of pasture and cattle and people who understood the earth. But Ada’s father had seen the joy in his only daughter’s face and had offered them his blessing. And they had wed. For six years and three months they had been blissfully happy. Until that fateful night when a bolting horse had thrown her husband, crushed him, and laid him down forever. The burial shroud had been sewn about her life as well as his.

  Ada rose to her feet. She moved like an old woman, bowed down by the thousand identical days she had yet to live. She would wed a man from the area. She would move to his farm and bake and mend and clean house and tend his needs. He would be a good man, conservative and steady and content with Wachau life. And never again would she sit before a roaring fire and listen to tales from beyond the boundaries of her safe little world.

  She raised her face to the sun and whispered words no one would ever hear. “Why did you come here, John Falconer?”

  Chapter 19

  Cody Saunders could not have said why he took the cut leading west off the turnpike. Surely he had no business with Moss, nor did he much care for the dice cup. His brother, now, that was a different story entirely. Jeb Saunders plied Moss as he would a well, drawing out a fistful of gambling gold every now and then. Jeb never won so much as to be unwelcome, of course. Cody debated going down to Danville and returning with his brother. But he was saddlesore and disliked the thought of another full day of riding for what Jeb would probably say he should have handled on his own.

  Truth be told, Cody Saunders did not even know what he should be asking of Moss. Jeb was the thinker for the both of them. Even so, he rode down the winding tree-lined lane and started up the final rise. He slowed as he approached the main house and gave the surrounding farmland more careful inspection.

  The Saunders brothers had been raised on a hardscrabble farm down east, a half day’s ride outside Edenton. When Jeb had been fourteen and Cody ten, they had slipped away and never looked back. Only occasionally did he and Jeb speak of the family they had left behind. They wondered about their nine brothers and sisters, many of whose names neither of them could remember. But they did recall the chores. Especially at tobacco harvest time, when they walked the long rows, dragging the burlap sacks tied to their shoulders and plucking the broad ripe leaves. By the end of the rows the sacks were so heavy the twine cut into their flesh. The heat was maddening, as were the flies. The biggest flies Cody had ever seen, and they bit. Worse even than the flies was the stench. The tobacco gave off an odor Cody still smelled in his sleep. The tar turned his fingers black and seeped through his skin into his blood. By the end of the day he was sweating tobacco juice, his head thundering and his gut churning. No, Cody did not miss the farm.

  But he knew the cycle of farming seasons. And what he saw did not make any sense at all.

  When they had come through last, Cody had stayed with their string of slaves bought from a handler outside Richmond. Jeb had gone to the house alone. No sense in showing Moss what they were after, was the way Jeb explained it. Cody had resented waiting in the muck and the rain with their ragtag chain gang. Jeb had returned leading six more slaves, only one of which he had paid for. The other five he had won in a two-day dice match. Which meant Cody was now seeing the farm for the first time that season.

  A voice behind him said, “Makes you plumb want to weep, don’t it?”

  Cody’s saddle creaked as he shifted his weight. He recognized the overseer. “Where’s Moss?”

  “Done taken himself off to Richmond.” The overseer was rail thin and hard faced, as were most of his kind. A good overseer drove himself as hard as he did his charges. The man’s current idleness did not sit at all well. “The gold was just a-burnin’ a hole in his pocket.”

  “Mind if I draw water for me and my horse?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Cody slid down and led his horse to the well. He plied the bucket and filled the trough, then drank long and slow. Only then did he speak. “Moss won himself some gold, did he?”

  The overseer laughed until he bent over in a coughing fit. He straightened and said, “That man ain’t never won nothing except trouble.”

  Cody took his time. It was something he’d often seen Jeb do. A man who wanted to talk would often give up information without being asked, if only the questioner waited him out. So he filled the ladle and drank again. As he did he inspected the plantation. The main house looked dilapidated. The fields were in even worse shape. Fences were down. The last season’s crop might have been harvested, but the stubble still stood. A good farmer would have plowed it under, giving the earth a chance to renew itself with this natural fertilizer. Beyond the pastures stood an orchard of apple and cherry and pear. He could smell the rotting fruit from where he stood.

  The overseer shifted impatiently. “Had a feller come in not long after your brother was here. Offered to buy the whole spread.”

  “That a fact.”

  “Wouldn’t be saying it if it wasn’t.” The overseer spit a stream of tobacco juice. “The fool agreed to Moss’s price, plunked down his money, and rode off. Craziest thing I ever did see.”

  “So Moss has sold out?”

  “If the stranger shows up with the rest of his money, Moss is gone. I asked the stranger if I had a job. The man didn’t even give me a by-your-leave.”

  “What’d this stranger look like?”

  “Right big feller. Looks like he could handle himself in a fight. Wore the cross blades like a highwayman.”

  “Black hair? Got a scar running from jaw to eye?”

  The overseer squinted at Cody. “Where you been seeing him?”

  “Don’t rightly recall.” Cody hoisted himself back into the saddle. “You catch the man’s name?”

  “I heard Moss say it was Mr. John.”

  “Yeah, that’s our man.” Cody adjusted the brim of his hat. “Guess I’ll be off, then.”

  The overseer called after him, “You see that feller again, you tell him he won’t find a better man than me to work his crew.”

  Falconer was coming out of the inn when he heard the noise. At first he thought it was a small beast, a calf perhaps or a baby goat. The sound was more like an animal’s keening than a child. But when he rounded the corner, he spied a crop of blond hair atop a huddled form, crimped into the corner where the brick chimney met the inn’s foundations. Next to him was the pup, who whined in time to the boy’s quiet sobs.

  Falconer neither thought nor hesitated. He reached down and lifted the boy, holding him around his shoulders, and stepped back into the sunlight. “Shah now, lad. You’re safe now. What’s happened? Who did this to you?”

  The boy tensed in his embrace, then relaxed a trifle. “I-I’m all right, sir.”

  “Of course you are. You’re as brave and fine a lad as any I’ve ever met.” The boy’s puppy gamboled about Falconer’s feet, coming close to tripping him up. “What is your dog’s n
ame?”

  “M-my mother won’t let me name him, sir. She says dogs and strangers don’t mix, and . . . and we must give him away.”

  “Well, I’m sure your mother is wise as they come. She loves you very much and wants only the best for her strong lad.” Falconer spoke mostly to let the boy hear the sound of comfort. “But my guess is you’ve given the dog a name in secret, haven’t you.”

  The lad moved away from Falconer’s shoulder and dragged his sleeve across his face. “Rusty.”

  “And what a grand name that is.” Falconer looked down at the pup. “Move back, Rusty, before I step on you.”

  The lad added his own voice. “Down, Rusty.”

  “Look there, he minds you and not me.” The lad smelled of ash soap and sunlight and animals and youth. “Did someone hurt you, lad?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You can tell me. It will be our secret. I’m good at keeping secrets, you know.”

  “No one has harmed me, sir.”

  The boy’s frank gaze and tone did not seem capable of lies. Falconer led him over to the bench and eased himself down. The lad made himself comfortable on the seat next to Falconer, his body set firmly against the big man. The pup played about his feet and gnawed on Falconer’s boot.

  Falconer did not have any experience with young boys. But his heart went out to this likely lad. “Do you want to tell me what left you feeling so sad? Is it something more than wanting to keep the dog?”

  The boy gnawed on his lip.

  “Well, never you mind. I have known many a day when sadness was my only companion, or so it seemed. And I was never one to go sharing my troubles with others. Except God, of course. I have always found God to be a good listener.”

  The boy began picking a splinter from the side of the bench. “I talked to God a lot after my pa died. I wished He would speak back to me. But He never did. At least I couldn’t hear Him.”